Comments from Israel, covering everything that you can imagine and more!

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Air superiority

What is the elephant in the room in the Gaza conflict?
Air superiority. It is so accepted without thinking about it, that no-one
realizes that this is the cause of the great destruction in Gaza and the
concomitant loss of life. When the Allies had air superiority during WWII what
did they do, they carpet bombed parts of Germany, they destroyed Hamburg and
Tokyo in fire-storms, they flattened the city of Dresden, full of German civilian
refugees, they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing ca.
100,000 civilians in each. Now Israel with complete air superioirty is
following the strategic path set by the US and UK, namely that in any conflict
one must have air superiority, not only to pummel the enemy, but also to protect
one's own ground forces. But with the advancement of technology the IAF can now
use mainly targeted munitions, so that civilian casualties are reduced. But,
nevertheless, in war there will always be casualties and always mistakes and
always "collateral damage."

There is a similar factor at play in the US intervention
in northern Iraq against the fighters of the Islamic State (ISIS). They may be
fierce suicidal warriors, but even they cannot make progress when attacked from
the air in an open desert plain by targeted missiles. The fact that the US has
total air superiority enables Pres. Obama to choose not to put "boots on the
ground," but to use a purely aerial strategy, while the Kurdish Pesh Merga and
Iraqi Army forces (now beefed up) counter attack the ISIS fighters on the
ground. That is how they recaptured the significant strategic target of the
Mosul dam. This combination of US air power and local ground troops can go a
long way to push back the forces of ISIS, although it cannot defeat them
totally, since they control many cities, including Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in
Iraq.

It is a primary Israeli strategy to always fight any
battle on the enemy's territory, since Israel is so small and densely
populated. Air superiority enabled Israel to win all its wars, the Six Day War
of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and so on. But, the new terrorist strategy
of missiles and tunnels to a large extent defeat air superiority. Tunnels have
to be destroyed by troops on the ground and as we have seen, even the IDF cannot
stop missiles being launched from hidden sites in populated areas. So even
though Israel must have air superiority to prevent a large scale military
attack, it needs other skills to ensure that the new terrorist strategy cannot
succeed.